A: You need the source code, which you can obtain in a variety of
ways. See section Where to Get Crystal Space. You also need a compiler and development system
for the platform which you are using. Some of the supported compilers are
GCC (including MingW and Cygwin), MSVC and Code Warrior.

Q: What do you need to run Crystal Space?

A: You need the following items:

-
A compiled executable program such as ‘walktest’ or ‘csdemo’, for
example. These are demo programs included in the main source archive.

Note that there exist two types of executables: statically linked and
dynamically linked. If you have a statically linked executable then you don't
need any of the following drivers. Otherwise you will need the remaining
items.

-
Several plugins for those applications. On and Windows (32 bit) plugins
will be ‘.DLL’ files. On most Unix systems they will be ‘.so’ files.
If Crystal Space compiled successfully then you will have a great deal of
those plugins in the Crystal Space directory.

-
You should also have the data directory which is included with Crystal
Space. This directory contains various texture and data libraries (like
‘standard.zip’ and ‘stdtex.zip’), data files for some of the
applications (like the ‘flarge’ world file for ‘walktest’),
shader definitions in case you are running with the new renderer architecture,
configuration files for various plugins in Crystal Space and a lot more.

-
Crystal Space applications also require a ‘vfs.cfg’ configuration file
which tells the virtual file system (VFS) where everything is located.

-
In addition to maps that are included in the data folder of Crystal Space
itself (‘flarge’ and ‘partsys’ for old renderer architecture,
and ‘particles’, ‘terrain’, ‘terrainf’, ‘r3dtest’,
‘stenciltest’, and ‘isotest’ for the new renderer) you can also
download additional maps for ‘walktest’. The map files included with
Crystal Space are normal directories but Crystal Space can also read
directly from ZIP archives.

Q: I downloaded Crystal Space but it won't run. What could be the
cause?

A1: Are you sure that you have downloaded all the necessary
components, as explained by the previous section? If not, then download the
missing components.

A2: In general, Crystal Space requires a 15, 16, or 32-bit
display and will not work with other displays modes. Note, however, that the
Mac OS X Server, OpenStep, and NextStep ports of Crystal Space are not subject
to this limitation.

A3: If you are using a dynamically linked executable then the required
plug-in modules, such as 3D renderer, 2D driver, etc., usually must reside in
the same directory. On Mac OS X, the plug-in modules can reside in a
‘components’ subdirectory. Most ports of Crystal Space use plug-in
modules by default.

A4: Are you certain that you are trying to load the correct map file?
If you are running the application from the command-line, then you can try
specifying the map file on on the command-line, like this:

% walktest flarge

Where ‘flarge’ is the name of the map file you wish to use. In this case,
‘flarge’ corresponds to the ‘flarge’ directory which is included
with ‘cs’. Also note that ‘flarge’ itself requires the file
‘stdtex.zip’ which contains all the textures.

Alternately, for WalkTest, you can change the ‘WorldFile’ setting in its
configuration file ‘CS/data/config/walktest.cfg’. For example:

Walktest.Settings.WorldFile = flarge

A5: If all else fails ask a question on the Crystal Space mailing
list. See section Mailing Lists.

Q: What documentation is available? Where can I find it?

A: There is a lot of documentation available. Not all of it is
completely up-to-date but we try to do our best in keeping it as up-to-date as
possible. Refer to the section in the Crystal Space manual which discusses
documentation resources. See Documentation Resources.

Q: I don't have lots of memory. Can I still run Crystal Space?

A1: You may want to decrease the size of the texture cache with the
‘-cache=<size>’ command-line option or the ‘CACHE’ configuration
option in ‘soft3d.cfg’ if you are using the software renderer. By
default the size of the texture cache is quite large (typically 5 to eight
megabytes in size), so adjusting this value might be useful for low-memory
systems.

A2: Using a smaller window size and a lower bit-depth can also
decrease memory usage. In addition to the memory used for the actual graphics
display, Crystal Space uses a Z-buffer containing 4-byte values with the same
dimensions as the display. Therefore, a display with dimensions of 640x480
uses a Z-buffer of 1,228,800 bytes.

A3: If you are still low on memory there is only one thing you can
do: decrease the complexity of the map. For every polygon in the world a lot
of memory used. If you just want to try the engine you can run Crystal Space
with some of the simpler worlds such as ‘room.zip’ or ‘maze.zip’.

Q: Crystal Space is really slow on my computer. What can I do to
speed it up?

A1: Crystal Space is a 6DOF engine. It needs to do
semi-perspective correct texture mapping to get a nice display and
calculations to achieve this are slow. You can expect that Crystal Space will
probably need the same kind of computer as a game such as Quake 1 or Quake 2,
at least a Pentium or a very fast 486 with a floating point co-processor.
Also note that Crystal Space is still in the developmental stage and has not
yet been fully optimized. You might try using smaller window dimensions
with the ‘-mode=’ option. See section Common Command Line Options.

A2: Use a hardware accelerated graphics card and driver. Such cards
are quite popular these days and can perform extremely well, especially when
compared to Crystal Space's software renderer. Framerates of 100 fps and more
are not uncommon if you have a properly configured OpenGL renderer. Note that
by default Crystal Space uses OpenGL. You have to use the
‘-video=software’ command-line option to go back to Software rendering.

Q: I'm using OpenGL with Crystal Space (via the ‘-video=opengl’
command-line option, for example) and the animation is extremely slow. What's
wrong?

A1: When this happens this usually means that your OpenGL renderer
is not using hardware acceleration. If you are sure that you actually have
a 3D card that is supported by OpenGL then you should make sure you have
recent drivers for that card and that they are properly configured.

A2: Note that some operations in Crystal Space require the
existence of a stencil buffer. If there is no hardware stencil available
OpenGL will revert to using software which is very slow. Some 3D cards
only have hardware stencil in some display modes. For example ATI and
nVidia cards only have accelerated stencil in 24/32-bit color mode and
not in 16-bit mode.

Q: I want to create textures for Crystal Space. What palette should I
use? How big should I create the textures? What format can I use?

A1: The palette does not really matter because Crystal Space
calculates its own optimal palette given a set of input textures. But there
are some things to keep in mind. Try to get the number of different colors as
low as possible without sacrificing for quality and if you design a set of
textures that are meant to be used together it is always best to let them use
a similar palette. This will make it easier for Crystal Space to calculate a
good palette.

A2: The width and height of a texture must be a power of 2 (such as
8, 16, 32, 64, ...). That's about the only restriction. Textures need
not be square. You can have textures with sizes like 16x256. If a texture
does not conform to the above mentioned limitations then it will be scaled.
This may mean that there is quality degradation though!

A3: Crystal Space textures may be in any of the supported image
formats, such as PNG, TGA, BMP, JPG, MNG and GIF.

A4: Unless a texture is not meant for tiling you should make sure
that it can be tiled. This means that if you put a number of textures next to
each other or above each other the boundaries should seamlessly integrate with
each other. Of course, it is entirely possible to create textures that are
specifically drawn for untiled usage. An example would be a texture
representing a computer keyboard.

Q: How can I actually make 3D models and maps for use in Crystal
Space?

A1: You can use Blender (http://www.blender3d.org/)
together with blender2crystal
(aka. b2cs, http://b2cs.delcorp.org/). blender2crystal works
very well and is fully supported by the Crystal Space project. Using this
convertor you can make complete maps with support for portals and much more.

A2: For animated models using Cal3D (see section SpriteCal3D Mesh Object)
you can also use Blender, which has support for Cal3D objects.
There is a tutorial on this subject at:

A3: For maps and objects using either ‘genmesh’ or ‘thing’
you can also use 3dsMax. There is a 3dsMax exporter plugin
included with Crystal Space (‘CS/scripts/max’) with associated
documentation which works very well. This script is made and used by the
PlaneShift project (http://www.planeshift.it). There is a tutorial
on this exporter at:

A6: There is a ‘Maya2Spr’ utility included with Crystal Space
which can convert Maya files to 3D sprites. Not for maps, though.

A7: There is a ‘3ds2lev’ utility to convert ‘.3ds’ files
to either a level or a 3D sprite model. This tool is very limited though
and the generated maps usually require hand-editing.

A8: There is ‘md22spr’ utility which can convert Quake MD2
and MDL models to Crystal Space 3D sprites. The animation frames are also
properly converted. This will not generate Cal3D models!

A9: There is md32spr utility which can convert Quake MD3 models.

Q: I would like to contribute to Crystal Space. What can I do?

A: Have a look at the section of this manual about contributing
to the project (see section Contributing to Crystal Space), and take a look at the To-Do and
Bug lists on the Developer's Project page at SourceForge:

A2: Read any other documentation related to this project as mentioned
earlier in this FAQ.

A3: If you need more information, you should consider posting your
queries to the Crystal Space mailing list, Mailing Lists.

Q: I want to write a game with Crystal Space. Can I do this?

A1: The ultimate purpose of Crystal Space is that it will become a
usable and powerful engine for writing games and other graphics visualization
programs. As a project which is still under development, it may be simple or
difficult to build your particular game, depending upon your specific
requirements. One way to improve the state of Crystal Space so that it better
fits your needs is to contribute to the project yourself.

A2: Crystal Space is under the LGPL licensing policy so you can
make commercial or shareware products using it. For more details about what
you can and cannot do, see the license, Licenses.

Q: How stable is the API for Crystal Space?

A: The API which you can find in the 0.90 release should be about
95% stable as compared to the 1.0 release. After 1.0 we will make sure
to keep backwards compatibility (until we release 2.0 :-)

The following section lists some more technical questions.

Q: I have some objects but collision detection is not working on
them. What is wrong?

A: One of the most common errors is to scale an object using
the transform in the movable. Unfortunatelly various subsystems in Crystal
Space (like collision detection and visibility culling) don't work on
scaled objects. If you want to scale your object you should do it
with HardTransform or <hardmove> instead. Note that for
some types of mesh objects (like 3D sprites) you must do this on the factory.

Q: I have some objects that seem to be culled wrong. What can cause
this?

A1: See the question about collision detection not working with
scaled objects. Don't scale your objects using the movable. Instead scale
them with HardTransform.

A2: Another common error is forgetting to call
movable->UpdateMove() after moving a model. If you don't call that
function then the visibility culler doesn't know the object has moved.

Q: Why isn't my polygon lit correctly? It is simply full bright.

A: Both the software and OpenGL renderer have a limitation on
lightmap size. For the software renderer the limitation is that the
final resulting lit texture may not exceed 1500000 pixels. To calculate
the final resulting lit texture size the easiest way is to take the
texture size that is used on the polygon (i.e. 64x64 for example) and
calculate how many times the texture is repeated on that polygon. If the
given texture is repeated four times on the polygon then you basically
have a total texture of 256x256 which will be fine. For the OpenGL
renderer the limitation is that a lightmap cannot be bigger than 256x256.
Note that there will be a lightmap lumel for every 16x16 texels on the
polygon. To avoid this limitation you basically have five possible
solutions: (1) split the polygon into smaller polygons, (2) use a smaller
base texture (this will also reduce size of lightmap/lit texture), (3)
decrease the number of times the texture is tiled on the polygon, (4)
increase the size of the lumels (i.e. 32x32 instead of 16x16) by changing
the ‘lightmapcellsize’ option in the world file, and finally (5) use a
low-resolution base texture and a high-resolution detail texture to add detail
(this only works for OpenGL).

Q: I added lights, and/or moved geometry in my level but they are not
correctly lit. What did I do wrong?

A: Crystal Space does not automatically recalculate lighting.
To do that you have to use the ‘-relight’ command-line option.

Q: I'm confused by the Crystal Space coordinate system. The 3D
renderer seems to work in reverse y. What's up?

A: When talking in 3D, Crystal Space defines the positive X axis
as pointing to the right, the positive Y axis as pointing upwards, and
the positive Z axis pointing forwards. 2D operations in the 3D renderer
(like when drawing polygons using coordinates perspective projected by
the engine) work with positive X axis to the right (as usual), and positive
Y axis pointing upwards (so (0,0) is in the bottom-left corner). This is the
exact reverse of how screen coordinates are usually defined but corresponds
better with the Y axis pointing upwards in 3D coordinates).
However, when getting mouse events the normal screen
space coordinate system is used with (0,0) in the top-left corner.

Q: Why can't I get the
iThingState / iSprite3DState / ... from my mesh wrapper? I
do scfQueryInterface from the mesh and it returns ‘0’.

A: A common error is to try to query the state interface for
a mesh object from the iMeshWrapper instance. However it is not
iMeshWrapper that represents the mesh object. iMeshWrapper is
only a stub in the engine to wrap a mesh object so the engine can use
it. To get the state interface you must query from the iMeshObject
instance instead. You can get this instance with mesh->GetMeshObject().

Q: I do not understand when I have to use DecRef() and when
not. Can you explain this reference counting to me?

A: In recent versions of Crystal Space we now have a new
csRef class which implements a kind of smart pointer. Smart pointers
make it easier for you to keep track of references. They will automatically
DecRef() when they are ready. Here is an example of their usage:

You can use the ‘st’ variable just like you would use the normal
iThingState reference. The only difference with code that doesn't use
smart pointers is that you don't have to take care of calling
DecRef. See section Correctly Using Smart Pointers.

Q: My objects are rendered incorrectly. It seems as if parts of it
sometimes appear and sometimes disappear.

A: Incorrect rendering of objects can be caused by bugs but there
is one common cause of this problem which is Z-buffer related. It is
important to realize that Crystal Space does NOT clear the Z-buffer
every frame (nor does it clear the screen). By default Crystal Space depends
on the geometry itself to clear the Z-buffer. For example, if you have a
room with a single object in it then you should use ‘ZFILL’ mode for
the room polygons (so that the Z-buffer will be filled but not read) and
‘ZUSE’ for the object (so that the Z-buffer will be both
updated and read).

In many cases levels are closed (meaning that there is some exterior object
which blocks the view into infinity). If you have such a convex closed
object at the boundary of your level you can use ‘ZFILL’ for that.
However, there are occasions when this is not possible. Either because there
is no exterior object, the exterior object is not closed, or the exterior
object is not convex. In that case you better use ‘ZUSE’ for all objects
and enable Z-clearing every frame. In world files you can do this by
using the ‘settings’ block and enabling the ‘clearzbuf’ option.

Note that you should invoke the method engine->GetBeginDrawFlags() in
your call to g3d->BeginDraw() to ensure that this Z-buffer clearing will
actually work (in fact you should always use
GetBeginDrawFlags()).

Q: I'm using a ‘thing’ mesh object and some of the polygons
are rendered completely wrong.

A1: Polygons in Crystal Space must be convex (meaning that every
line between two random vertices of the polygon is fully contained in
the polygon).

A2: The vertices of the polygon must all be on the same plane.
For a triangle that is automatically the case.

A3: If you specify texture coordinates using ‘uv’ on three
of the polygon vertices then those three texture coordinates must be
different.

Q: I'm trying to use some plugin but it says that it cannot find it
(i.e. csQueryRegistry returns null).

A: It is important to realize that csQueryRegistry
does ‘not’ load a plugin. It only looks for some component in the object
registry. There are two basic ways to load a plugin: the first is to use
csInitializer::RequestPlugins() and the second is to manually
load the plugin using csLoadPlugin. RequestPlugins() is
best because it actually registers the plugin with the object
registry and it also correctly manages config file, command-line and
request plugins (so you can override a plugin on command-line/config file).

Q: How can I show FPS (Frames Per Second) in my Crystal Space
application?

A: Add the following entry to the user-specific application-neutral
or application-specific domain (see section Configuration File):

Global.System.Plugins.iBugPlug = crystalspace.utilities.bugplug

This will make sure that the BugPlug plugin runs in either you or any
Crystal Space application (dependent on the config domain you chose).
BugPlug shows FPS (among other things) and is otherwise not harmful. You
can also use BugPlug to make screenshots (press Ctrl-d followed by
F12).